Christian – Golden Podcasts

Tell me about Golden. 

Golden is a podcast advertising agency, and our goal is to help clients expand their funnels and increase their conversions, so they can use podcast advertising as a scalable acquisition channel.

I started the company about four years ago with a friend when I was teaching and working in Spain. At first, I was just trying to earn more income—I wanted the freedom to travel and do whatever I wanted—but things went really well right off the bat, and we realized we had something viable on our hands. 

 And I get to work in a really cool space with podcasters. I mostly work in health and wellness and lifestyle, and that's been great because fitness, health, and wellness are important to me.

Tell me the story of why you reached out to David. 

“Being a founder and being your own boss, it’s incredible freedom. You learn to rely on yourself, and that’s really valuable. But it also comes with a lot of stress and a lot of fear of the unknown.”

I was really happy with my current business, but after a few years, I realized it wasn’t something I wanted to do forever. I had the opportunity to start my next business, and as that new opportunity started to show itself, I was trying to figure out how to limit the amount of time I was working on Golden so that I could try something new.

At the same time, I wanted to be sure we continued to serve our clients and that the business could flourish. So I was trying to figure out how to do both things.

Can you tell me about the tangible and intangible benefits of working with David? 

“Since I started working with David, my revenues have increased about 50%!”

David helped me take a completely different perspective on Golden. We’ve talked about this a lot, and it's on his YouTube, but David really helped me stop working in the business and start working on it. That led to a fundamental paradigm shift for me, and I was finally able to spend more time figuring out what I needed to do to bring the business to the next level. 

David helped me figure out what my goals were and write them down and make myself aware of them because one thing I was guilty of—and I think a lot of people do this—is that I kept things, what I imagined for the future, vague. The result was that I had a sense of what I wanted out of the business, but I hadn’t articulated specific goals. And he helped me do that. Then, we started walking through the practical steps I had to take to get back more freedom, more time and space.

“I’ve bumped the time I spend on Golden down to 30%, which I never thought would be possible.”

 A year ago, I was so entrenched in the day-to-day that I couldn't see myself leaving or taking a more minimalist role. I didn’t think the company would be able to survive without me doing everything.

And now that seems like such a ridiculous thought. Because in hindsight, it's so obvious that there were changes that I could have made and that I ended up making that got me there.

So what else changed?

Together David and I figured out how to optimize the business in a way that would let it grow and make it possible for me to move on.

Before I started working with David, I was hyper involved with my clients’ marketing teams and processes, and I was constantly trying to be aware of everything that was going on in their businesses. I wanted to provide the best service I could, and I told myself what I was doing was the only way. But I knew something had to change.

David helped me understand that a lot of that time wasn’t essential. He helped me streamline my business processes, which meant changing the way I went about helping my clients and doing my job. The result was that I spent a lot less time in weekly meetings and instead, I started building the tools I needed to help my clients without having to be involved in everything. 

Making those changes helped me realize what was essential. As I created more systems, I was better able to work my clients into a refined process that let me do great work for them. Those systems are part of what allowed me to take a step back and free up a lot of my time. 

I was also able to work on a lot of the things I had ignored over the years like partnerships, sales decks, my website, and defining the core tenets of my business. I had a lot of anxiety over all those loose ends, especially because they were all client-facing things. But up until then, I always felt like I needed to be working so much in my business that all the other stuff had to come later. With all this free time, I was able to finally get to those things.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about working with David?

“ He’s so good at helping me think through it, do it intelligently, and helping me arrive at insights or conclusions on my own.”

When I first started Golden, it wasn't necessarily fun for me. There's this feeling of fear and scarcity, when you're just trying to make rent, you're trying to survive, you're trying to make enough money to cover your expenses and, and live and, you know, that's not easy to do. Hopefully you get to a point where you can do that and then it grows beyond that. 

And somewhere in there you have to figure out how to enjoy it. Because there are a lot of fun components, meeting cool people and working with cool companies. And that part's all very exciting. But internally, you might still be freaking out because you're trying to survive, right?

Once you’re on the other side of that, if you're lucky enough to get there, you can start fine tuning yourself and fine tuning the business and all of that work is really enjoyable.